


Night Still Comes

by jaxington



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Post 5x06
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-17
Updated: 2015-02-17
Packaged: 2018-03-13 09:51:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3377138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaxington/pseuds/jaxington
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He screams at Svetlana and this isn’t exactly unusual, but this time instead of narrowing her eyes and screaming right back, her lip quivers for a moment before she promptly bursts into tears.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Night Still Comes

**Author's Note:**

> Writing this was certainly not in my plans for the day, but that episode fucked me up way more then I thought it would, hitting way too close to home, and this made me feel better.
> 
> And I thought Svetlana might have a little more to say. This is basically Mickey's day between dropping Ian off at the hospital and showing up for visiting hours.
> 
> Also this is really, really not been beta-ed.

The morning is too fucking bright and he finds himself standing around in the hospital parking lot with four Gallaghers, just not the one he wants. Ian’s in that hospital, but they wouldn’t let Mickey follow.

They stand around in a semi-circle, shuffling their feet, unwilling to get any further away from Ian. Maybe they all just don’t know what to do next.

In his arms Yevgeny lets out a little whimper and Mickey didn’t think it was possible to be more heartsick than he was a moment ago, but the pathetic little sound forces him to think of the baby along for Ian’s wild ride, left in a locked car on a hot day.

And he does not have it in him to be mad. Tomorrow, maybe, after he sleeps for the first time in a long time. Or in a couple days when Ian is back home and better. Or in years, when all this is just a bad dream. Maybe then he will be mad, but now Yev is unharmed, warm and wiggling, so he just isn’t.

At least Ian is somewhere safe, too. He hopes.

He clutches his son a little closer, and the baby settles. The few wispy hairs on the top of his head are damp from Mickey’s tears, but he’s done crying for now. He is too much of everything to cry, relieved and terrified and hopeful and guilty and exhausted. All that stirs around in his chest and he thinks he might be vomit sick, too. Or maybe he’ll just collapse on the pavement and lie there for a while.

Lip breaks the silence, muttering some shit about needing to get back to his ivy tower, needing to get his girlfriend her Mercedes. They pile back into the car and the drive is completely silent.

Back in the neighborhood, Debbie asks if he wants to go with them to the Gallagher house. When he shakes his head, she offers to come over to his house instead, to make him breakfast.

Mickey frowns at her, completely baffled by her apparent concern for him and too tired to puzzle it out.

“You look like you could use some breakfast,” Debbie says with a shrug.

“No, I’m good.” It is such a blatant lie that Debbie winces. “I just need to crash, kid.”

“Maybe tomorrow,” she says as if cooking for Mickey is somehow important to her.

Mickey just nods as Lip pulls up to his house. He gets out of the car with a gaggle of Gallaghers murmuring their thanks and goodbyes. He has no fucking clue what they could possibly be thanking him for.

He takes his time retrieving the diaper bag Ian did not bring on his trip from the trunk and turns when he reaches the porch steps to watch the Gallaghers drive off.

What he wants is not in this house, but he needs to sleep, needs to reunite baby and angry Russian mama, needs Ian do to it with him.

But Ian is not here so he walks up the steps with Yev for company.

“Svetlana?”

The house is too quiet and Mickey doesn’t like it.

He expected Svetlana to be waiting by the door, peaking out the window every ten seconds, chain smoking now that she’s popped out the yuppie baby, and ready to snap up her own the moment Mickey appeared with him. Even through her labor she seemed to be in constant contact, yelling at him via text message and insisting on updates even when Mickey had nothing more to say than, _yes we are still in the car yes the baby is fine._

Instead the house is too quiet, filled floor to ceiling with suitcases and meticulously organized piles of clothes.

“Svetlana?” he calls out again, his voice barely working. He wonders if this quiet house means that there is another disaster right around the corner. Svetlana wanted to meet him here, rather then some other, non-Ian-holding hospital where she just popped out a kid, but maybe something went wrong and she couldn’t leave and maybe she died and he’ll have a baby to raise alone, without Ian in any shape to help, with Mandy in a different fucking state, with his goddamn wife fucking dead.

He might not be thinking all that clearly and he sets off to explore the too quiet house.

Svetlana is not dead, but crying quietly into her pillow when Mickey peeks into her bedroom.   This really must be the end of the world, if Svetlana’s crying. She’s never cried, not fucking once, not even that time Ian used the word _rape_ and Svetlana really understood what she did that day with Terry.

Until this moment Mickey was pretty sure she didn’t even have tear ducts.

She looks as pathetic and wrung out as he feels, face pale, eyes red, and Mickey lingers in the doorway, watching Svetlana have a rare human moment. Since he last saw her, she’s pushed a real, living thing outta her fur burger. He can’t really get his head around it.

Yevgeny is moving and restless again, little legs kicking out and working up a good cry.   Svetlana sits up, reaching out for the kid and making no effort to hide her tears or even slow them down. Mickey wants to join them in the waterworks.

Three weeping Milkoviches, all in a row.

Yev stops crying as Svetlana holds him close, sobbing out her relief and murmuring in Russian when she catches a breath. She kisses his head and rocks him against her chest as she lies back down, head on the tear soaked pillow.

There is nothing left to do and Mickey hangs listless in the doorway. Ian is somewhere safe, getting help. Yevgeny is home, freshly diapered and fed. The kid is probably in need of a bath, but there is no way Svetlana will let Mickey take on that task now, not even if he could manage to explain that his hands can’t stay idle or he’ll scream and not stop.

He needs sleep, but he can’t face their bed alone and his back still aches from spending so many hours on that lumpy ass couch. The thought of being alone at all is repugnant. Maybe Debbie still wants to cook him breakfast.

Glancing over his shoulder, he inches back out the door, oddly reluctant to leave the kid after spending so many hours not knowing where the fuck he was.

“Come,” says Svetlana, her voice a croaky rasp. “Stay.”

Mickey doesn’t argue and he kicks off his shoes, stretching out on the very edge of the bed that used to be Terry’s.

“Nika is working,” Svetlana murmurs when she finally stops crying. “And they tell me I leave hospital too soon, against doctor’s recommendation. Stay, and make sure I do not die.”

“Alright.”

They lay there in silence, watching Yev slowly fall asleep, both pretending that Mickey is here because he needs to make sure Lana stays alive, not because he wants to be. And maybe she just wants him here too, not that either of them would ever fucking admit it.

“How’d it go?” Mickey asks. “With the yuppie baby?”

“Is fine. The money is in my bag.” She makes a move like she is going to get up, wincing like she’s sore, but Mickey stops her with a hand on her shoulder.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says. “You’ll wake the kid.”

Nodding, Svetlana settles back down.

“You okay, though?” he asks not really sure why he even wants to know.

It’s like he needs to confirm that everyone in his little world is at the very least breathing. He even sent Mandy a text somewhere between Indiana and Illinois, not filling her in yet, just making sure she was still okay. _Yes, I’m fine douchebag_ was the reply. He’ll have to call her tomorrow with all the details. Maybe it’ll be enough to get her home.

Svetlana almost cracks a smile, pressing her nose into Yevgeny’s temple and inhaling deeply.

“Better now,” she says.

He hopes it’s true.

* * *

 

There was no conscious decision to do so but he must’ve fallen asleep because when he opens his eyes the sun’s gone down and Svetlana’s got a tit out. The baby is making happy baby sounds and Svetlana is smiling down at him, cradling his head and cooing in Russian as he chows down.

“What’d I tell you about that commie shit?” Mickey mutters, rubbing his eyes.

“Speak fucking English,” Svetlana replies, doing a piss pour impression of him. The accent is all wrong.

He hides his smile in the pillow but quickly loses his grin when he thinks of Ian, wondering if he’s eating dinner or fucking terrified or sedated again. Vising hour tomorrow can’t come fast enough.

One eye open, he peeks at Svetlana, smiling down at their son.

Sharing a bed with the lady who is legally his goddamn wife is completely bizarre and not even something that happened all that often in those shitty few months after the wedding, when Ian was gone and Terry was breathing down his neck and every day was like drowning.

These days he is drowning again and there is no father to fight, just a fucking mental illness that doesn’t respond to fists or guns or screaming about how much he likes Ian’s dick from the hood of a cop car.

Over and over, he’s failed to protect Ian, and now this is something he can’t even fucking fight or see, a danger he does not understand.

“How is he?” Svetlana asks.

“I’m not the one with him attached to my goddamn nipple,” Mickey replies. “Why don’t you tell me?”

“Not baby,” she says with a huff. “Carrot boy. Ian.”

Sitting up, Mickey realizes that he aches all over. His shoulders tense, nearly reaching his ears, and despite the hours of sleep he is exhausted right down to his bones. Pain pulses through his head and he digs his palms into his eyes, trying to beat back the headache.

“It’s so fucked up, Lana,” he mutters.

“He is so fucked up, you mean,” she replies, not quite able to hide her lingering fury. Mickey is too tired to argue and he doesn’t exactly blame her, either.

“He’s fucking sick. There is a goddamn difference.”

“I know he is sick!” she hisses, glaring at him even as she transfers Yev to her shoulder, holding him secure with one hand and putting her boob away with the other. “I accept this before you do.”

“Fuck fine! You fucking told me so! Huzzah for you. Rub some more salt in the goddamn wound, why don’t yah?”

He screams at Svetlana and this isn’t exactly unusual, but this time instead of narrowing her eyes and screaming right back, her lip quivers for a moment before she promptly bursts into tears. She cries with her whole body, face twisted and ugly, shoulders shaking.

“What the fuck is _wrong_ with you?” asks Mickey, horrified.

She hiccups and mutters in Russian, patting Yevgeny’s back as she calms down. “He take my baby and then I birth yuppie baby and I have the—“ She hiccups again, lets out one more big sob. “I have the… the… How you say? From the birth? With the chemicals that make me cry.”

“Hormones or some shit?”

“Yes! That.”

“Do you need me to get you a fucking tissue?”

Hiccupping again, she shakes her head and Mickey takes that as his opportunity to get out of this fucking room, maybe take a shower and eat something and sleep for a few more hours until its time to go see Ian in the morning.

“How is Ian? You did not say,” Svetlana murmurs, wiping her eyes and preventing his escape.

“In the hospital.”

“Yes. This you tell me. But how is Ian.”

“Not fucking good.” He sits back on the bed, leaning against the wall, and pictures Ian as he walked down the hall with his shoulders hunched, the metal gate separating them, hands deep in his pockets, holding himself all weird like that sedative really fucked him up and if he so much as breathed wrong he would completely crumble. “He was fucking terrified, Lana, but what the fuck else was I supposed to do?”

“Nothing. There is nothing else to do. Hospital will help him.”

That is the standard line around here but Mickey doesn’t even know what it fucking means. What does helping Ian look like? What’s the hospital going to do that Mickey didn’t? Pump him full of drugs? Find some magical dosage that will keep Ian from thinking that it is a good idea to _shoot a fucking porno_ and take a baby to Disney World with no money and no food and no diapers? How the fuck does hospital-help work?

Mickey just focuses on breathing.

“I like him,” Svetlana continues. “Ian. More than I like you.”

It strikes him that he really fucking lucked out with Svetlana. If he had to pick the Russian whore he would be forced to fuck and then marry at gunpoint by his raging homophobe of a father, it would be Svetlana, with her steel spine and her sharp tongue and her quick mind.

Mickey snorts. “Oh yeah, Mrs. Fucking Milkovich? Back at yah.”

Svetlana grimaces, pulling that scary fucking Russian face that makes Mickey believe her when she starts ranting about chopping off dicks. “I like him so I trust him. I trust him and see what happens?”

“Yev is fine. See? Right back in your arms like you wanted,” Mickey says, panicking a little and gesturing wildly towards the baby now cradled to Svetlana’s chest.

“This is luck,” she insists, laying a hand over Yev’s belly. “That is all. So much worse almost happened. Baby could be hurt, baby could be dead.”

“Ian loves the kid, alright? I think it just got all twisted up in his head, but he loves that kid.”

“I do not care,” says Svetlana, calm and steady now. Mickey doesn’t get how they are managing to be so fucking civil for once in their fucking lives, but he’s not complaining because he can’t handle a fight, not with his head throbbing and his shoulders aching and his heart beating _Ian_. “How he feels does not matter when Yevgeny is not safe.”

“What do you want me to say?” Mickey thumbs at his lip. “It was fucked up, but it’s over now. Yevgeny’s home and Ian’s getting help.”

Whatever _help_ even means.

Svetlana sneers, nostrils flaring, eyes rolling. “Yes, you forgive boyfriend. You forget that he kidnap Yevgeny, leave him in hot car for twenty minutes while he is who knows where doing who knows what, driving him away with money or baby supplies. He took _baby_ , Mickey. “

She looks down at said baby and sniffs. And he gets it, understands why she feels betrayed and angry, but he won’t claim to join her in it. She’s right and for Mickey, Ian’s already forgiven.

“He took my son,” she continues. “Our son. I will not forget and it will not happen again.”

Mickey nods down at his hands.

“It does not work,” she says, looking up at Mickey now. “This way we live, all of us in this house, it does not work.”

“Till now it’s been working out fine,” Mickey argues.

Svetlana shakes her head. “No more. Orange boy and Yevgeny? They do not live in same house. Not again.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Mickey mutters into his palms. “Can’t you let me focus on Ian right now? You really need to choose this moment to be difficult?”

“You focus on Ian,” she says with a shrug. “I hope he get better, but orange boy and Yevgeny do not live in same house again. This is warning, statement of fact, nothing for you to focus on.”

“We’ll figure it out, alright?” Mickey says because that’s what they do. They figure it out. The hospital will make Ian better and Svetlana will get over it and things will go back to the way they were, when Mickey really thought Ian wasn’t sick anymore.

“Here,” she says and suddenly Mickey finds himself with an armload of baby.

He can look at the kid without remembering it all now, Terry and his gun and Ian’s face when he realized what The Russian was called in to do. He can look at the kid and smile at him when he gurgles happily, like he does now.

When Mickey smells Yevgeny’s head, he even feels a little better.

“Baby need bath,” Svetlana says, shooing him out of her bed as she lies back down. “Give it to him. Clean up. Nika will be home soon. She makes dinner and you will eat it.”

* * *

 

Debbie Gallagher cooks him breakfast, eggs and bacon. Last night Svetlana and Nika watched him the way Debbie does now, eyes narrowed, taking in each time Mickey’s fork goes from his plate to his mouth.

What the fuck is with all these goddamn women, insisting he eat when his stomach wobbles and his heart beats _Ian_.

He nibbles on some bacon and lets the Gallagher Family Theater wash over him, their raised, bickering voices weirdly comforting after the silence of his house these last few days without Ian chattering and Yevgeny crying.

“I don’t care what you say, I’m going!” yells Debbie, Mickey’s caloric fucking intake momentarily forgotten.

“Me too!” says Carl, moving to stand shoulder to shoulder with his sister. The two of them present a united front of tween stubbornness and the sight makes Mickey grin.

“You aren’t going!” Fiona yells back, increasingly frantic, hair wild and flying around her head as she marches across the kitchen towards the kids at the stove. “Neither of you are going. You, Debbie already missed the second day of high school and you can’t miss the third. And Carl, it’s your first day. You have to go.”

“We want to see Ian,” Carl insists.

“And you didn’t even know that school was starting!” shrieks Debbie, cheeks stained red. “Now you want to tell us what to do? After you’ve been gone all fucking summer while Ian fell apart?”

Fiona takes a staggered step back and Mickey winces right along with her. She is the supposed fucking guardian that let her fucking phone die, but Mickey was there, all fucking summer, first in denial and then having no fucking clue how to help Ian. He was there all fucking summer, and Ian still fell apart.

This is getting ugly fast and Mickey considers letting the kids continue to lay into their absent sister, taking their worry and their fear out on Fiona. Maybe some of it will be true, maybe some won’t, but all of it will be unproductive and they don’t have much time before they need leave for the hospital.

There is no fucking way he’ll be a second late for seeing Ian, not to watch these assholes play out their family drama.

He’s got shit to do. He’s got to see Ian. He’s got to learn what exactly _help_ means.

“Alright, alright,” he says, getting up from the table and abandoning what’s left of his breakfast. Hands up, he puts himself between the feuding family members. “Maybe big sis is right on this one.”

“What!” shouts Debbie.

“No fucking way,” yells Carl.

Now he’s got the united front of tween stubbornness screaming in his face, protesting mightily. He rubs his temples and very much wishes they would all just go away.

“Shut the fuck up!” he yells back and by some miracle, they do. “I’m just saying it might be a little overwhelming with a whole horde of us tromping in to see him on day one. Maybe let me and your sister feel it out and then we’ll see about the weekend.”

In unison Debbie and Carl seem to deflate, nodding and collecting their backpacks before stomping out of the house, throwing glares over their shoulders at Fiona on the way.

Twisting the ring on her left hand, Fiona sighs and turns to face Mickey.

“Thanks,” she says. “And not just for this.”

Mickey waves her off. “What’s it gonna be like?”

“Rough, probably,” she says with a shrug. “The places Monica always ended up felt like this weird combo of jail and a hospital. And the first couple days she was always real out of it, when they started to get her medicated. But I don’t know, how it will be for Ian.”

Mickey nods and tries not to fucking cry again in front of another fucking Gallagher. Fiona glances at the time on her phone, grabbing her jacket and nodding towards the door.

Steeling himself for whatever comes next, Mickey takes a deep breath and follows.

Time to go see Ian.

 


End file.
